3 November marks five years since CommGap writer Caroline Jaine was evacuated from the Iraqi city of Basra. In 2006 she was heading Press & Public affairs at the British Embassy Office, during what proved to be one the most perilous moments during the British occupation. Today her book - a personal account of her 100 days in Iraq - is launched with a seminar at the House of Lords in London. The seminar, like the title of the book, draws from the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plan for a “Better Basra” and looks at whether the city is in fact any “better” today.
An extract from A Better Basra appears below:
Here was that movie feeling again, but this time the soldiers, perhaps about a hundred or so of them, were like extras waiting to go on set. I was intrigued about where they had been, what they had done in Iraq so far and where they were off to. What was their day like? Why weren’t they at that moment busy “soldiering”.